Just curious about the internal machinery / interaction between Mint's and Debian's dev teams:

1. How do the bug-fixes and patches for LMDE make it to upstream?

2. LMDE is, IMHO, Mint's most exciting and promising version. Ubuntu has received some flak (perhaps not without reason) for not contributing to upstream bug-fixes. With LMDE's update packs, Mint's devs fix things in Debian's Testing repos and 'cushion' the upgrades against nasty surprises. In this context, how do Mint's dev team interact with Debian devs? Do the push the bug-fixes upstream or are the bug fixes out in the open for Debian to collect?

3. Have Debian devs expressed any interest in incorporating some of Mint's tools (e.g., MintUpdate, MintMenu) into Debian's core repos?

Clem posted Raphael Hertzog's Debian Admin Handbook's info on a blog post. That was really nice of him. I hope Mint & Debian teams have 'friendlier' relations than Debian has with its other famous derivative.

(I've tried LMDE for a while and loved it. I am seriously thinking of replacing one of my other installations with LMDE. Maybe after update pack #4 is released...if I can hold back until then, which seems unlikely... )

I could be wrong about this, but my understanding of the update packs is that the Mint team simply mirrors the Debian repo without making any changes to the binaries. This allows them to have a frozen set of packages to deal with so that users don't having the "moving target" of Debian testing to deal with.

If I am wrong about this, I do hope someone will explain what the Mint devs do in the UPs because that could completely change my views on running Latest/Incoming on this machine.

I could be wrong about this, but my understanding of the update packs is that the Mint team simply mirrors the Debian repo without making any changes to the binaries. This allows them to have a frozen set of packages to deal with so that users don't having the "moving target" of Debian testing to deal with.

If I am wrong about this, I do hope someone will explain what the Mint devs do in the UPs because that could completely change my views on running Latest/Incoming on this machine.

Oh, I might be wrong then. Re-reading the earlier blog post regarding update packs for LMDE, it seems you are right - perhaps the Mint devs do not change the binaries... My questions were more along the lines to understand "What's/How's the give-and-take between the Mint and Debian teams?"